An aircraft weapons bay typically comprises a cavity having an opening through which stores may be deployed, and a door assembly for exposing/closing the opening of the cavity. The environment in and around the cavity, when the doors are opened during flight, can be severe. In particular, the pressure in the cavity can fluctuate significantly. The pressure fluctuations can give rise to significant aero-acoustic effects (e.g. audible noise, vibrations etc.).
Extreme aero-acoustic environments are undesirable for a number of reasons. For example, the lifetime of stores in the weapons bay may be reduced (e.g. by vibration damaging the energetic materials within the store (for example warhead and rocket motor)), electronics or other equipment in the aircraft and/or in the store may become damaged, or the flowfield may be sufficiently disrupted to undesirably affect the launch trajectory of the store.
Efforts to alleviate the severity of the aero-acoustic environment in the weapons bay have tended to focus on permanent modifications to the aircraft structure, for example by placing control surfaces upstream of the weapons bay, or by re-shaping the boundaries of the weapons bay. These have been found to have only a moderately beneficial effect on the aero-acoustics. Furthermore, these are typically generic solutions, and tend not to be tailored to specific stores/configurations of the weapons bay.